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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
Film:3
DVD:7
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| Oh,
how the mighty have fallen. |
|
As
a longtime fan of director Dario Argento I fully intended to review
this film a year ago, when the DVD was released. But watching
it left me so utterly dispirited that I just couldn't motivate
myself to sit down and write, even though negative reviews are
always the easiest for me. The sense of crushed expectations was
simply too powerful, too oppressive. |
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I'd
been intensely eager to see it ever since reading in 2006 that
the Italian horror maestro would actually be making the third
chapter in his long-proposed "Three Mothers" trilogy,
which began with 1977's masterful Suspiria
—
in my opinion perhaps the greatest supernatural horror film ever
made in color —
and continued with Inferno
(1980). At the time I could never have imagined just how shockingly
bad Mother of Tears would turn out
to be. So bad, in fact, that I just wanted to put the travesty
of it out of my mind. (Thus no review last year.) However, a recent
viewing of a high-definition HBO broadcast of the film spurred
me to give it another go. |
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Well,
the movie's still a bloody mess. |
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Asia
Argento (the director's daughter, star of his 1996 psychological
thriller The
Stendhal Syndrome) plays Sarah Mandy, an art restorer
living in Rome. One night she and a colleague (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni,
Opera)
are working at the Museum of Ancient Art when a strange box, recently
unearthed by workmen digging outside the walls of an old cemetery,
arrives for examination. Intrigued by the cryptic symbols decorating
the box, the women decide not to wait for the curator’s approval
and open it. Inside are occult artifacts —
a ceremonial dagger, demonic statuettes, a red tunic —
all immensely old. Only moments after Sarah leaves the room to
fetch a reference book her friend is savagely attacked and slaughtered
by shadowy figures that appear out of nowhere, commanded by a
sinister, malefic monkey. |
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Barely
escaping alive, Sarah calls the police to the scene but they’re
flummoxed by the bizarre nature of the crime, proving to be of
little help. The mysterious box, along with its contents, is gone.
And someone, for reasons unknown, wants Sarah dead. Running for
her life, she begins a quest for knowledge that puts her in contact
with a famed exorcist (Udo Kier, hamming it up with gusto), a
lesbian medium (Valeria Cavalli) and a wizened alchemist (Phillipe
Leroy), each of whom provides keys to the puzzle. Sarah learns
that the box contained magical talismans of the dreaded Mater
Lachrymarum —
the "Mother of Tears", one of three powerful witches
who in olden days spread misery, pestilence and death in their
wake. As an inexplicable wave of murder and mayhem grips Rome
with growing intensity, our heroine realizes that she must find
and confront the Mother of Tears before the witch's evil influence
engulfs the entire world. |
|
Let
me state up front that I'm not ragging on Mother
because it jettisons the stunning visual aesthetic for
which Suspiria and Inferno
are so renowned. The film looks nothing like the first
two installments in the trilogy; there is no candy-colored gel
lighting or bizarre architecture to dazzle the eye and conjure
mood and atmosphere. I can fully understand why some Argento fans
might be disappointed by this —
the shoes don't match the blouse and skirt, as it were —
but my attitude is different. Suspiria
and Inferno are about normal people
discovering and entering a weird supernatural realm, whereas
Mother is concerned with a supernatural
force escaping out into the real world. In this context
the more realistic look of the film is, I believe, entirely appropriate.
(And sometimes one can't win for losing… Had Argento shot Mother
in the same baroque style he would've probably been criticized
for repeating himself.) The musical score, too, plays much less
of an integral role here than in the first two films. Provided
in this case by Goblin alumnus Claudio Simonetti, it's not particularly
memorable but serviceable to the task. |
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My
problems with Mother stem from just
about everything else... The story is tediously episodic:
Sarah seeks out an expert to get information about what's happening,
learns a tidbit or two, the expert is brutally killed, and then
she's off again to another expert. (Rinse, repeat.) It's conspicuously
obvious that there wasn't enough money in the budget to properly
depict the city descending into chaos. I don't expect ironclad
logic in an Argento film, but some of the characters' actions
are so unbelievably stupid it's maddening. (The corker: When told
that the murderous cult could be tracking her movements electronically,
Sarah throws away her cell phone. She then goes home to her
own apartment.) A
key prop, Mater Lachrymarum's magic tunic (supposedly medieval
in origin), looks like a raggedy T-shirt tricked out with dime
store glitter applied with a glue gun. The witches who converge
on Rome to celebrate the Mater's impending triumph are ridiculous,
like drunken Goth chicks at a Halloween pub crawl. Their object
of worship, the Mater herself (Israeli actress/model Moran Atias),
would
seem more at home working the pole and doing lap dances at the
Itchy Kitty than unleashing an apocalypse from the catacombs beneath
the Eternal City. And with her wildly uneven performance — effective
in one scene, positively cringe-worthy the next — Asia simply
isn't up to carrying the film. Her scenes with the ghostly apparition
of Sarah's deceased mother (Asia's real-life mom Daria Nicolodi,
who floats around via poor FX offering aid and encouragement)
are nothing short of laughable. |
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If
Papa Dario accomplished anything of note with Mother
of Tears, it was in realizing the most viciously brutal
murders of his oeuvre to date. Yet herein lies another problem...
Some of the murder sequences are dragged out to such absurd lengths
that they become unintentionally funny, in an almost Monty Pythonesque
way. The over-the-top killing of Cataldi-Tassoni's character in
the museum — in addition to having her face destroyed, she's stabbed,
sliced open and strangled with her own intestines — is the prime
example of this. Excising a few seconds of this goofy overkill,
the R-rated theatrical cut (which I watched on HBO) actually works
better. |
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Because
I'm an Argento admirer it pains me to say this: Shorn of ultra-violence
and nudity, much of Mother of Tears
would play like some crappy made-for-SyFy Channel movie. There
are a few flashes of the old master in evidence — notably in
a long, single take that follows Sarah as she explores the Mater's
villa — but they're few and far between. At this point he might
need to just call it quits and rest on his well-deserved laurels.
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| No
complaints about the DVD, at least. Both the 2.35:1 anamorphic
transfer and its Dolby 5.1 audio track (English only) are absolutely
topnotch. In addition to the U.S. theatrical and Italian teaser
trailers there are two featurettes on hand. In A Conversation
with Legendary Filmmaker Dario Argento (8 min.) the director,
speaking English, offers his thoughts on returning to the Three
Mothers story after nearly 30 years; The Making of Mother of
Tears (33 min.) is mainly of the puff piece variety but will
still interest Argento fans for its behind-the-scenes glimpses
of him at work on the production. (Looking happy and relaxed,
he obviously had a good time making the film.) 9/19/09 |
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